This final post draws on two earlier posts this week on the value of evidence and the role of innovation in development.
Given these observations, how should philanthropic donors and the organisations they support engage with governments to maximise their effectiveness? I'm specifically talking about support to implement ongoing programs, enhance state capabilities etc.
For a start, it's worth always keeping in mind that in the Indian context most persistent public policy challenges are too complex for the marginal philanthropic funding to make a meaningful difference within reasonable time. The objective then should be to identify the highest leverage in terms of the activity or intervention, implementation unit, and the process proposed.
This identification is a critical aspect whose importance is not adequately recognised. It demands a discovery process which donors and non-profits generally overlook. Even when they undertake some embedded initial exploration, it's soon becomes a routine and opportunistic engagement. For donors and implementation partners, this discovery process demands their highest level engagement for some period of time. It has to be also borne in mind that even when discovered, the scope and outcomes from such engagements will be modest and not as grandiose as the donor/partner may want.
I believe the biggest challenge comes from the ideological priors of the donors or their implementation partners. Most donors come with their priors about the theory and process of change. As I have blogged on numerous occasions, these perceptions are deeply flawed and does not reflect the messy realities of development and public administration.
In fact, this ideological cloud results in atleast two important distortions among the donors (and their partners).
1. They start to look for problems and solutions which fit into their priors. So they tend to look for those issues and solutions which are amenable for reasonably quick resolution. But these are often marginal to the larger problem, and/or not the priority of the government, and/or detracts from scarce administrative bandwidth.
2. Strong priors marginalise the requirements of the government stakeholders. It's not uncommon for donors and their partners to pay lip-service to the requirements of the government agency and pursue their agendas. The absence of clear articulation of their objectives and priorities by the government stakeholder is often the convenient excuse. The result is limited government participation, interest, and ownership in the outcomes of the intervention. This problem is exacerbated by many donor/partner's proclivity to engage at their highest levels with only the political and bureaucratic leadership and not cultivate mid-level officials (the actual permanent implementers) within their government department partners.
In this context, I can think of four common mistakes that donors make while engaging with governments:
1. There are very few important public issues where governments would require external support and which can be resolved in finite time. It's therefore important to be cautious on guarding against confusing psychological satisfaction at the appearance of having solved a problem without actually having solved it. Donors should shape their expectations about the ambiguities and uncertainties associated with their engagements and what can be achieved from them. This would also influence their own shaping of the expectations of their government partners from the engagement.
It's easy to confuse and/or delude yourself into believing that you've made a difference when all you've done is staged an event or put a nice looking band-aid. Or done a small pilot. This is what most philanthropic interventions end up doing.
2. A few high level photo-ops should not be mistaken for genuine government interest in the partnership. If someone offers support in addressing a complex public issue, then very few governments are likely to refuse it. The government has nothing to lose and no skin in the game. But getting important government leaders actively engaged and owning up the partnership is very hard and demands immense effort. The form of top-level ownership should not be confused with the substantiveness required.
3. While top leadership engagement is important, the sustainability and success of any intervention is critically dependent on ownership by the Department or implementing agency. This requires active engagement and ownership of the senior and middle-level Departmental officials. They are the internal champions of change. Donors and their partners rarely spend the required efforts to cultivate Departmental officials.
4. Most often, the external support ends up doing hygiene activities that are a source of nagging irritation for the primary stakeholder - like routine program/project management, recording meeting minutes and other documentations, preparing presentations etc. These routine things crowds out change requirements on serious issues.
In light of all the above, I'll prescribe four essential requirements for any engagement by a philanthropic donor with governments (nothing new, but just putting it out there nevertheless)
1. Identify a stakeholder who is committed to the cause and has the administrative agency to decide and execute the decisions that emerge from the intervention. It's no good to have a high level approval of the Chief Minister or some high functionary who's not the Head of the administering Department. In fact, I'll venture that an engagement led by the Chief Minister's Office is most likely to fail for several reasons. Nobody wants to give up a photo-op on being seen to be doing something new, though very few are committed to actually being engaged actively in doing it.
2. Let the stakeholder articulate the problem statement with hypotheses, about issue(s) agitating him/her and for which she/he wants external support. It's important that the individual concerned goes through the struggle of articulating the problem statement. Many times, the stakeholders themselves are not clear on what they want. Even more problematic is that (due to incentive compatibility issues) most often the researchers/donors have priorities which are marginal to the concerns of the stakeholder.
Even if the donor/partner identifies a problem and solution through embedded or other exploration, it has to necessarily be validated as being a felt-need of the government leader. This is hard and requires conscious and intense effort. It's required to directly or through a very high quality consultant engage intensively with the individual leader to elicit and articulate the problem statement and hypotheses. Donor's should eschew the temptation to identify the problem and formulate the hypotheses for the government leader.
3. The government leader should be actively engaged throughout the process with ideation and co-creation of the intervention. In simple terms, the successful implementation of the intervention is closely correlated with the intensity of engagement by the government leadership. This can be hard given the scarce time available for top officials for active engagement in such marginal partnerships.
4. Finally, it's important for the partner to embed within the government agency and work with a team of officials identified by the government to execute the intervention/plan. In course of the engagement, donors and their partners would do well to keep in mind the four common mistakes outlined above and avoid them.
Needless to say, like with any generalisations as above, there will always be exceptions. And it's also possible that I'm using too high a standard in making these suggestions.
For these reasons, the simplest entry-point for donors/partners lies with supporting the implementation of specific programs. The task is clear and ring-fenced. The platform offered by these programs can then be used to consciously prioritise the building of implementation capacity in a purely opportunistic manner.
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